Google made 30 “search improvements” during the month of December 2011, all of which are discussed in their latest monthly recap. Particularly intriguing among these is the project with the internal codename of “Megasitelinks.”
According to Google, “Megasitelinks” is an improvement to their algorithm for picking sitelinks. “The result is more relevant sitelinks; for example, we may show sitelinks specific to your metropolitan region, which you can control with your location setting.”
This isn’t the first time Google has made a tweak to their handling of sitelinks. In recent months, they’ve begun showing up on home pages, as well as sub-pages. They’ve also expanded to include Google+ data, and have been cropping up in the 12-packs since last summer.
Google has also made improvements to its Image Search tool as well. The first, codenamed “Simple,” is an enhancement to landing page quality signals for Image Search, to ensure that Image Search linking to the “highest quality source pages” in addition to returning the most relevant images. The second update, codenamed “Leaf,” introduces better spam detection by applying the same principles used for main search to Image Search. The third image-related update, codenamed “Matter,” changes how an image’s size is used as a ranking signal.
Other changes made in December include:
- More accurate byline dates
- Soft 404 detection
- More accurate country-restricted searches
- More rich snippets
- Improvements to autocomplete
- Enhancements for queries in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Hebrew
- Live data for football (NFL and NCAA) results
- Improvements to related queries
- Better lyric search results
- Changes to +1 button on results page
- Improvements to upcoming events on the Places Panel
- Enhancements to SafeSearch
- Expansion of encrypted search to regional domains (in the U.K., France, and Germany)
- Faster mobile browsing
Sources:
“Megasitelinks” Announced by Google As a Part of Search Quality Improvements! (PageTraffic Buzz)